Nice Work If You Can Get It

I recently received a letter from a mechanical engineer in Egypt who works for a wastewater treatment company...

Mar 1st, 2006

I recently received a letter from a mechanical engineer in Egypt who works for a wastewater treatment company, said he was very adept at AutoCAD in “2d and 3d workshop drawings” and was seeking new employment opportunities.

My first reaction was to email back that, while I was an editor for a water and wastewater trade magazine, I wasn’t aware of any jobs in his area. But then I googled “water jobs” and came up with a few suggestions for him.

In particular, www.jobreservoir.com, www.waterjobs.com, www.my-water-career.com and www.matchtech.com/engineering/water/ - to name a few websites that list jobs in the industry. Likewise, the Water Environment Federation and American Water Works Association both host “career” pages on their websites as well.

Then someone suggested I check out Industrial WaterWorld publisher PennWell’s own jobs website, PennEnergyJobs.com. I hadn’t thought of this because the site’s name implies it might not be the best place to seek water industry employment. It’s for energy related industries - and the jobs are generally working for power plants, oil companies or refineries.

Still, on the particular day I checked in early March, there were 3,068 total jobs listed. Searching under “water,” I found 107/303 jobs. Narrowing that to “water treatment,” I found 9/92 listings. And there were 5/38 listings for “wastewater.” Jamie Matlin, PennWell recruitment advertising director for the website, explained the two figures to me. The first is for jobs listed only at PennEnergyJobs. The second is for jobs listed on a national network of local job boards. The website is affiliated with this network, but its jobs aren’t available to the network.

While these were for U.S. listings, Matlin pointed out PennEnergyJobs is international and viewers can search by country as well. Nothing popped up for Egypt, though, so our friend will have to check the other resources I gave him.

As background, Matlin said PennEnergyJobs was launched in August 2005, which was opportune because of the impact of devastating hurricanes last fall - free listings were made available to affected employers. It hosted its first career fair at Power-Gen International in Las Vegas in December. Others are planned for Power-Gen Europe and Coal-Gen, while the PGI career fair will more than double in size to over 30 exhibitors this December.

Compared to its nearest competitors, both online for up to five years or more, PennEnergyJobs already has jumped to the lead. Another petroleum jobs site has only about 1,000 job listings and another energy jobs site has only about 2,000, Matlin said.

That’s nice work if you can get it.

On another note, I participated in the PennWell Water Group webcast March 8: “Industrial Cooling Water Reuse” by Hach’s Phil Kiser, who has an article in this issue. It was very illuminating as was the previous webcast: “Ensuring Boiler Feedwater Quality thru Optimizing MU Pretreatment and Continuously Monitoring Condensate Iron,” sponsored by Chemtrac. If you have a chance, go and view them at our website. They’re archived for a year.